The voice of the heart

Do you like the sound of your own voice? So many of my clients tell me that they hate the way they sound when they speak, and some can’t even bear to listen to themselves at all. Add to that the fact that for a majority of women the throat chakra is often the one most in need of healing and it’s easy to glimpse the untapped potential in the voice.

In creative myths and legends around the world, it is often a sound that summons every thing into the state of being, a sound which is understood at the symbolic level to be the voice of creation, the voice of the god/goddess. It’s not a huge leap from here to say that our own voice, then, reflects how powerful we hold ourselves to be, and how effectively we can manifest our own creations.

A significant number of nations are emerging now from centuries of suppression of the feminine voice, and it’s no wonder that as women it’s not always easy to step into this new freedom of expression. For men, it can feel just as prohibitive to express their feminine aspect. In previous incarnations we’ve been routinely punished, betrayed, cast out and even killed for speaking the truth of what we feel and know to be true, and what contradicts the dogma of the patriarchy. At a deep soul level we’ve learned to modulate our voices to sound acceptable and non-threatening; for reasons of safety and self-protection, we’ve dammed up the free flow from heart to throat.

I believe it’s this falseness of tone and vibration that we can hear in our own voices that causes us to have such a strong negative reaction to its sound. Often people will say on listening to a recording of themselves, “It’s just nothing like I think I sound,” and they’re absolutely right of course. What they’re actually hearing is a multi-layering of tones absorbed and adopted from sources that are considered okay to be heard in general society. Their own, rich and true (and potentially dangerous) note has been habitually masked beyond recognition.

Like our fingerprints, our voices are totally unique – no one else has quite the timbre, resonance or wave patterns that ours has. A friend recently told me that her bank was introducing a voice recognition service to their telephone service as they believed it would provide far more effective security than passwords and PIN numbers. Only this morning, I read a research article in which experiments had proved that not only do we use our voice to convey how we feel to others, but emotions conveyed in our own voice influence the way we feel (you can see the full article here: http://www.sciencefriday.com/articles/the-emotive-power-of-voice/).

Now this is where it gets really interesting for me and why I felt moved to write this article. Essentially the experiment’s results showed that if someone’s voice was recorded and then played back to them with a slight modification (not discernible to them) to express happiness, sadness or fear for example, then that person modulated the way they felt to match what they’d just heard! Isn’t that fascinating? It also makes it imperative that you learn to reconnect your heart and your throat so that you’re speaking with your true signature voice (what teacher Chloe Goodchild would call the naked voice). The more you speak from this place, the more you affirm the power of that voice to yourself just as much as to those listening to you, and the more easy it becomes to speak from this place….and so it spirals out. You really do create what you speak, as the myths and legends have long told us.

Recently, I experienced this for myself when I was asked to record myself saying a prayer I’m using in a regular spiritual practice. The difference was astounding. The prayer had been words before, beautiful, evocative words it’s true, but they felt external and distant somehow. When I listen to myself speaking the same prayer, it feels alive within me, it becomes who I am, and I become the prayer. This is powerful magic, but I also adore that my intuition led me today to read the science that proves the wisdom. I sometimes like to call science magic for the sceptical!

I felt moved to record a meditation to help you reconnect your heart and your throat chakras, so you too can express all that you are with your unique voice. You can listen to it here: Heart-centred Voice Meditation. In the meantime, though, if you’re one of the many who hate the way they sound, why don’t you simply record yourself saying this sentence a few times, and listen back to it every day for 40 days as well as saying it out loud whenever you feel like it:

“I speak the truth from my heart with confidence, passion and integrity.”